Abstract

Investigation of the shifts in communicative strategies required in the acquisition of new discourses must of course take account of the requirements of the mode of communication as is evident from work on oracy and literacy. In this paper I consider aspects of talk into telephones by young children in play. The linguistic issue under examination is expression of the incorporation of recognition of another's perspective, a movement towards recontextualisation of language from the primary conversational contexts of joint environment and experiences reflected in face-to-face talk on 'here and now' topics with familiar interactants. It is shown how the voicing of roles that is entailed to some degree in pretence telephone play motivates these shifts to meet the challenges of telephone discourse as presented to the children in their society and as recreated by them in their own cultural practices.